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Greenheart Games fights piracy with piracy in Game Dev Tycoon

Those looking to get their pirate hands on Game Dev Tycoon from indie Greenheart Games are in for a surprise as a 'very special' version is doing the rounds in file-sharing communities. Pirates are hit with piracy.

The indie devs have booby trapped the 'cracked' version so that virtual game developers are failing, hard, as their virtual little products get hammered by pirates. Irony in 5, 4, 3, 2...

If this situation weren't snigger worthy enough, one 'suffering' user asked: "...can I research a DRM or something?" Another wrote piracy "ruins me! Not fair."

Greenheart Games is made up of Patrick and Daniel Klug. The game is priced at $7.99 but after a day of sales 3104 of the 3318 copies out there were pirated. The Klug duo decided to pre-emptively strike the file-sharing swashbucklers by releasing their 'specially cracked' version.

"As a gamer I laughed out loud: the irony!!!" said Patrick Klug. "However, as the developer, who spent over a year creating this game and hasn't drawn a salary yet, I wanted to cry."

These in-game bankruptcies induced through rampant piracy didn't get the message across and soon enough the whinging started. It's here we get the tragic and yet side-busting question about 'DRM research'.

"Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can't make any profit," wrote one user, reports Eurogamer. "It says blah blah our game got pirated stuff like that. Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something?"

The game came DRM-free with an installer for all three platforms, and included a Steam key if they were Greenlit.

"There are still individuals who either can't make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game," Klug said. "I don't have a quarrel with you."

"To the rest who could afford the game consider this: We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play."